Florence is the Italian city where Giovanni Boccaccio witnessed the Black Death firsthand. In the book’s account, the city gives the pandemic a human and local point of reference within a catastrophe that moved across continents and killed about half the population in the areas it reached.

Setting in the Plague’s Spread

The bubonic plague reached Tana, at the mouth of the River Don on the Black Sea, in 1346. Traders traveling along the Silk Road had brought it from China; fleas carried by rats then spread it from Tana through the Mediterranean, aided by Genoese traders. By early 1347 it had reached Constantinople, and by spring 1348 it was spreading through France, North Africa, and Italy. Florence lay within this expanding zone of disease.

Boccaccio’s Witness

Boccaccio witnessed the plague’s arrival in Florence firsthand and later recalled what happened. His account describes a disease whose symptoms could change: swellings appeared first in the groin or armpit, while later cases involved dark marks on the body. He also recorded that physicians’ advice and medicine could not stop the disease, and that death often followed within three days of the symptoms described. The city’s significance here is therefore not as a political center or a site of institutional change, but as the setting through which the book presents an eyewitness record of the pandemic.

Significance in the Book

Florence connects the plague’s broad geography to a specific witness and a remembered experience. The account begins with trade routes, ports, and the movement of infection, then turns to what Boccaccio saw in the city. That shift makes Florence a crucial point in the narrative: a named place where the scale of the Black Death becomes legible through testimony, while the reported mortality establishes the severity of the wider catastrophe.